I'm going to be setting up a git repository for data wizards. Since they are simple XML, this I feel is the best way for developers to use/manipulate/contribute to them.

I have developed my first fairly extensive wizard. This wizard lets you build a weapon, select models for impact and a missile, and create weapon with a launch missile effect. Ignore for the moment the Ability options, they don't do anything yet (WIP).

I chose to do this one first because it is a common thing, to want a weapon that does launch and impact. I'll be refining it and the embedded wizards (Effect Creation) as time allows. Properly creates all the model, sound, actor, unit, effect and weapon entries. Something that before would have taken easily 30 minutes now takes like 3-4.

I just got a warning that my CPU was overheating, which never happened before on this computer. I had the editor open with SC2 in the background for about an hour. When I closed them it started cooling off immediately. Did they break its idle coding that badly?

Yes, the 64 bit client is not stable/optimized yet. I would avoid it for the time being. There is a patch coming out tomorrow that may address these issues.

I may attempt to go through and enumerate all new fields for all data types. It may be difficult due to the sheer number, but I think it is warranted given the changes can prove very beneficial to people

ArcanePariah wrote:Something that before would have taken easily 30 minutes now takes like 3-4.

That sounds really pivotal. This was the second most pressuring thing about my project. I'm used to huge workloads but generally in fast editors. Even then the time consumed by mundane editing can be enormous. But in BW I could make a unit from nill to full sfx/graphics and implementation in about 8 hours. Sounds like with your wizards I could probably expect similar results, at least for baseline units without a lot of actor fluff. I really wish the AI could take it, though. :\

The game appears to eat up a bunch of CPU power when minimized. For me it was about 12-13%, the same as when I had it handling enough effects and validators to slow it down. Pause it in a window and it goes down to 0-1%, but then minimize it...

Yeah, the cache bug is definitely still there. It doesn't always result in the cAbility dupe errors anymore but I am definitely seeing it with the AI galaxy files. Isn't there a way to just force clear it? I looked for the temp file to delete ages ago but couldn't locate it, and all suggested files weren't it.

/e

AP suggested working in Components, so I'll give that a shot and let you know how it goes.

/e 2

So, working in components is pretty neat. It had some bugs before that might be fixed now (or just may have been fixed between my last test routine and now). I haven't tested it with sensitive data yet, like global triggers or unit xml.

In this context, I have 0x05 open and I'm able to modify something like the AI galaxy in the mod it's dependent upon. No errors or anything, I can load right up and see my changes without having to save and reload in an infinite cycle. Now, preferably I'd just be able to run multiple editors or tabs and have the mod open at all times to make data changes, but the reload time is considerably less now than it was before. So that's pretty nice. Unfortunately the editor still takes multiple to many seconds to change text values and triggers are just as unusably laggy as they've always been. But hypothetically between XML and wizards you can still start approaching a shadow of Brood War's first toolsets in terms of time-to-actuation of any given unit.

And people wonder why I halted lotc for Starcraft 2. This post is a great example. I just want to create maps with some custom sounds and graphics. Why do I have to learn pseudo-code to do this. So annoying.

Depending on the kind of graphics, I honestly fear the actor work more than the graphics themselves. An AO unit could take dozens to hundreds of hours to iron out all the sound and effect related junk for, while porting the model and then making the particles from scratch could take a fraction of the time. This is coming from a guy who wasted tens of thousands of hours gleefully mangling things in iscript. Sc2 is really unenjoyable to work with in comparison.

Voice acted dialogue for cinematics was particularly drawn out and time consuming back in WoL. I don't think they made any quality of life changes to how that pipeline is done since then, but I haven't checked.

Else, relatively simple stuff is reasonably okay to do. I replaced many of the default terran sounds pretty quickly.

In related news, we have made significant progress in Apex's AI. Maybe not necessarily night and day with some cases, but FPS gains of 30-40+ in others are being recorded.

There's also been some flailing as mesk mentioned in several places with SC2 again. The AI and galaxy is such a fucking mess. Whoever did the AI is literally one of those retards that feels the need to hook everything into the engines tick. Everything past the race definitions is being run every second of game time. This means everything related to build switching and unit stocks is being run every second the entire time. Since we're not even using the build switching they are I opted for getting rid of it all and cock blocking them on a bool switch. Time related changes are just done through a trigger executing a function that handles the rest, once. You know what? The AI works just as well as it did, while not eating the games performance doing meaningless bullshit.

They spent far too much time making the AI act like a human player instead of making something that actually worked. There's still issues like the AI taking a long ass time building anything. They will only do it one building placement at a time and it's really stupid. Large battles still absolutely melt the games performance. It's kind of funny because the reality is that majority of the calculations shouldn't even be that different from SC1 or hell, WC3. Yet it runs magnitudes worse, not even graphically either because turning it all off doesn't even change anything. It's ridiculous getting sub 30 FPS on my system when shit all is happening on the map, even the prologue campaign performed badly at times.

Ah I see. Any chance you can recode the battle AI so it s not as bad as you say? I thought maybe if one could decode and recode any part of it that would be easiest but clearly its more dumb than I thought.